James Carl Lagman Osorio

Professional Background

James Carl Osorio is a doctoral student of Modern European history at Brown University. He holds a master's degree in historical musicology and piano performance from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Osorio's research sits at the intersection of sensory history, sound studies, cultural history, musicology, and literary studies to reconstruct the sensorial experiences in Germany during the tenure of the Drittes Reich against the backdrop of the Second World War and the Holocaust, allowing him to explore the history of lethal sciences, the transnational history of solidarity between Sephardic/German Jews and Filipinos, and politics and poetics of listening to Genocide survivors.

Osorio’s research on Modern Germany and the Holocaust has received multiple grants from the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies and the UW-Madison Mead Witter School of Music. His publications have appeared in the Journal of Asian American Studies, the International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies, and The American Music Teacher. He has also presented at various conferences, including the American Musicological Society’s Annual Meeting, International Conference of the Armenian Genocide Museum Institute, the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s European Studies Conference, the University of Michigan’s Charles Fraker Graduate Conference, and the Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs. 

Fellowship Research

While at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a Summer Graduate Student Research Fellow, Osorio will work on his research project, “Spectral Soundscapes in the Germanosphere, 1933–1945: A Sensory History of Nazi Death-Worlds.” His research engages with a sensory-based reimagination of the Konzentrationslager (KZ) system in the Germanosphere from 1933 to 1945 and beyond. Grounding soundscape as a gateway to explore the relationship of the senses, lived experience, and place, questions leading Osorio’s research include: How can a historical study of sound and the senses illuminate our understanding of the Nazi concentration camp system? How does a KZ’s soundscape change, evolve, and transform throughout its existence? How did a camp’s soundscape affect the other senses—olfactory, gustatory, and haptic—of the prisoners and perpetrators? Is it possible to engage our senses with the sensory history of the concentration camps against the resuscitated grains of antisemitism, neo-Nazism, unwarranted prejudice, and Holocaust denial? 

Osorio will utilize the Museum's Alexander Kulisiewicz collection, oral testimonies, ego documents, historical film, music, and audio to challenge, rupture, and eventually move away from the traditional narratives and visually oriented notions of the Holocaust. His work strives to create a sentient story—using sound and the senses as essential conduits for a panoptic historical sensory study of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust—that is relevant to how we perceive these histories of mass atrocity and genocide today.

Residency Period: June 1, 2024–August 31, 2024